Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
typelit.io
typelit.io
HST: "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music. And from typing out parts of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald - these were writers that were very big in my life and the lives of the people around me - so yea I wanted to learn from the best I guess."
http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2014/06/hunter-s-thomps...
HST was always great in small rapid outputs of writing, which is captured well in his letters (similar to how his collection of articles are his most popular works, but these deserve a similar look).
He obviously had some sort of ADD and later on combined with a long series of drug/alcohol addictions, so it makes sense he was better in short blurbs. Even his most famous novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has a feeling of multiple long spurts on a typewriter.
Which is always how he wrote. Always also at the very last minute of the magazine due date and/or because he was running out of money and needed the next advance.
I believe this is common in creative fields. Long periods of meh and spurts of greatness.
Anyway the book series is here, usually called the Gonzo Letters:
https://www.goodreads.com/series/64386-the-fear-and-loathing...
Only the 2nd one has a Wikipedia page for some reason (the 3rd one came out in 2014) but the first one (The Proud Highway: The Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955–1967) as a young writer who is often desperate and broke was most interesting IMO, even though his life or writing wasn’t yet as it would become famous for (but definitely still as wild) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_America
I thought making it through the other two 700+ pages of letters was quite an achievement. I was planning to read the 3rd one at some later point in my life.
I guess I'll still have to wait ... the title was really great too "The Mutineer: Rants, Ravings, and Missives from the Mountaintop, 1977-2005".
It also serves as a link to your insurance provider in each location, so reimbursements are automatic.
It is a wonder drug for me. I used to spend a majority of my time farting around on the internet at work, then working long hours and scrambling to get my work done before the deadline. Now I am able to be productive more consistently and don’t miss nearly as many deadlines.
I only take it at work so I am pretty much just sitting in front of a computer when I'm on it.
The early days of uni for me were the first time I was actually responsible for ensuring that my med supply continued and that's a big part of why I'm hesitant to try tapering off of it - it was incredibly difficult for me to find the motivation or the energy to actually fill up my prescription if I had let it lapse and the days (up to eight in the worst case) I was without meds I completely dropped the ball on schoolwork and other responsibilities.
So I'm worried about tapering off since I'm concerned I might not be able to stop tapering or I would burn a lot of goodwill/financial security recovering from the tapering off if it went poorly. That all said, ADD is different for everyone with different levels of apathy and concentration, I wouldn't be surprised if mine was a particularly potent variety beyond what most folks deal with but, with meds, I'm able to cope and have a nice life.
The philosophical questions about personhood don't really ever stop nagging away at you in the background, but I'm happy with things as they are - sorry if this was a bit of a downer response ;P
This is something that's bothered me since my university put out a survey asking about time spent on homework.
Suppose the following things happen:
1. A math class assigns a proof.
2. I look at the problem, fiddle around with it for 20 minutes, and get nowhere.
3. I play Final Fantasy for 6 days.
4. I go back to the problem. In 40 minutes, I have the proof worked out.
How long did I spend on the proof? What if the counterfactual was
1. Proof gets assigned.
2. Look at it, do nothing.
3. The day after, sit down and spend 3 hours proving it.
How long did I spend then? Are the two scenarios... different?
As with most things, this comes with diminishing returns as you push toward minimizing one over the other.
Sometimes, even negative returns, e.g. because of increased context switching costs, or confusion and general malaise caused by staring at something for too long.
But this is the problem with a survey of "how long does the homework take?". The question isn't well defined. The answer doesn't exist.
The drugs stimulate your executive function which helps you concentrate.
In my implementation, I collect little thoughts (shower thoughts, observations, good turns of phrases, etc.) into a single continuous Google Doc. I revisit it often and guided by my current emotions and interests, try to coalesce like-ideas and rewrite them into a large idea. Some ideas eventually snowball into something substantial.
Unless you're a columnist with a deadline (with innate talent driven by adrenalin), everybody knows how difficult it is to write an essay from scratch. However if you've been collecting ideas, and have been developing and coalescing and rewriting them over and over again (often for years), the essay almost writes itself.
[1] https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2016/05/04/weinberg-on-writing...
This is also why I always type in all the examples from programming books instead of cutting and pasting.
Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528483
Qui scribit, bis legit
(Maybe your sight-reading is quicker than your playing? Mine is nearly the opposite.)
[1] Quintilian even finds value in exercising criticism of popular examples (because of course, even way back in the first century, The Old Days Were Better. Elsewhere Quintilian complains that people in his day only repeat a Cliff's Notes knowledge of greek authors instead of reading the originals in full.)
> "It will even at times be of value to read speeches which are corrupt and faulty in style, but still meet with general admiration thanks to the perversity of modern tastes, and to point out how many expressions in them are inappropriate, obscure, high-flown, grovelling, mean, extravagant or effeminate, although they are not merely praised by the majority of critics, but, worse still, praised just because they are bad."
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
and makes a good point about a pedagogical advantage to criticism of works other than one's own:
> "I will venture to say that this particular form of exercise, if diligently pursued, will teach learners more than all the text-books of all the rhetoricians: these are no doubt of very considerable use, but being somewhat general in their scope, it is quite impossible for them to deal with all the special cases that are of almost daily occurrence. The art of war will provide a parallel: it is no doubt based on certain general principles, but it will none the less be far more useful to know the methods employed, whether wisely or the reverse, by individual generals under varying circumstances and conditions of time and place. For there are no subjects in which, as a rule, practice is not more valuable than precept. Is a teacher to declaim to provide a model for his audience, and will not more profit be derived from the reading of Cicero or Demosthenes? Is a pupil to be publicly corrected if he makes a mistake in declaiming, and will it not be more useful, and more agreeable too, to correct some actual speech? For everyone has a preference for hearing the faults of others censured rather than his own."
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
Im demang tili peroba pash im demang finyish vide fit.
You would not read or download the lessons. You typed all the python in word by word. I think it really helped the learning process to type it out. It was slow and deliberate, even to mistyping and making mistakes (and fix them).
Writing (and reading) short disconnected bits is fairly easy: nothing interrelates strongly, composition is simple and forgiving. Longer works are complex: they have structure, arcs, need to retain interest, jumps and connections need to be plausible, the whole be consistent (unless inconsistency is used for effect), etc., etc.
And you don't get this knowledge simply by copying out great works.
I see a similar failure-to-grasp in some proposals for hypertext or advanced publishing systems. Reading is inherently serial, in that we follow lines of text on a page. Interactivity --- usually defined by the ability to skip between previously-written segments --- just offers more serial paths.
The value of hypertext and related tools may be far more on the writing process, where vastly more sources can be referenced and cited with greater ease. Some might be incorporated into the final work, but an excess of interconnections and quotations is itself distracting.
I see this as a particular blindness of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, despite many fascinating and original elements to it.
Well, I think the point is that you may get knowledge, but nt necessarily of the type that lets you make another great work. Doing is an act of learning, whether very small amounts of learning as you do something you've done countless times before, or possibly large amounts of learning as you try something absolutely new, or learning about yourself and what you like, what you don't, what you feel is worthwhile even if you dislike it, etc.
Ultimately, there's something to be learned from everything. Even the book you read that purports to teach you someething that you find worthless for the task should be illustrative of either what things are not useful for you in learning that, or how to structure something in such a way that it's hard for you to take away good meaning from it, and ultimately, some hints about what to look for next time that doesn't have the same problems.
So, copying isn't necessarily creating, but it should be an act of learning, and learning should hopefully help in creating, even if it's something totally divorced from what you were originally copying.
And any learning process which focuses largely on output or product rather than process, shares this deficiency.
To your other point, serendipitous discovery is very much a thing. I find that it is helped by haviing a conceptual structure or mental model which allows slotting new concepts from unrelated areas into a larger whole.
Recent example: moralising pathologies fallacy, in wildfire:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24684652
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e...
> I find that it is helped by haviing a conceptual structure or mental model which allows slotting new concepts from unrelated areas into a larger whole.
I very much agree. In fact, I think discovering new mental models is one of the best ways to come to new understandings about things. My entire stance on topics has changed in the past when I found on revisiting it I now had a mental model that I thought applied better/more closely than the ones available previously, and looking at the topic from that new perspective yielded a different opinion.
My entire stance on topics has changed in the past...
I keep seeing this, revisiting topics, questions, books, etc., and immediately seeing some now-obvious relationship or aspect. It's an argument for returning, at least occasionally, to familiar ground. Though it generally helps to have journeyed elsewhere.
Also for both extensive and intensive reading. Domains which focus exclusively, or even only extensively, on intensive analysis and exploration, seem more prone to going off the rails or ending up at dead ends.
The downside is that it's easy to 'overfit' and lose your own voice.
Maybe he means like jazz musicians? (I'm one.) Every musician I know has transcribed solos. You pick some solo you like but have no idea what they're doing, transcribe it, and learn to play it along with them. Bits and pieces perhaps will rub off in your own playing. You don't want to sound like them, but it's good to be able to if you want – and for that you need to absorb their style, so your body can just go into that mode, without having to think about it. I'm a piano player but have also transcribed sax, trumpet, bass lines, gospel songs, reggae, funk, .. even taps dripping, babies crying etc etc.
The reasoning is that when you produce output you are by definition producing something at your own level, so little improvement occurs. When you consume input (and transcription is a great way to do it), you are consuming input of a native speaker - or in the case of Jazz, a master player - which is at a much higher quality level than what you could produce yourself. So input drives the learning process.
The exception is for motor e.g. pronunciation or playing technique, which do benefit from practice.
Do you mean learn other people's songs from sheet music, or do you mean write down, from the sheet music, the same song again on blank sheet paper?
Edit: Or do you mean write down the song via hearing?
You can buy books of solo transcriptions, but I've found that they're absolutely useless. (and always inaccurate) Maybe it's like reading a book vs. typing it out?! hehe. At first glance I couldn't see how typing a book out would help anything, I mean, it's already written down for you! The main element of learning by working out bit by bit what it is, isn't there. But there are elements in common - it's a little like playing a solo you've written down, and you would absorb the word patterns if you typed a whole novel I guess.
Probably also more common among jazz musicians than rock musicians, who don't emphasize sheet music and music theory as much (as much, it's certainly more prevalent than outsiders would naively think).
And of course, all these categories blur together. There wasn't any reason to take his post and interpret it in absolutist terms.
One of the authors she mentioned was Yasunari Kawabata, who is widely admired for his writing style in Japanese. I believe she also said that she got the idea to do this from the tradition of shakyō (写経), the copying of Buddhist sutras by hand [0].
I have never retyped literary texts myself, but I used to teach English literature classes to Japanese students in which I would read the texts aloud in class before we discussed them. I found that, over the years, that experience heightened my awareness of writing style and maybe improved my own writing as well. I can see how retyping might have a similar benefit.
Been prepared that it will sound absolutely terrible for the first few months or even years.
Just like anyone can trace or copy a picture drawn by a master, copying text won't grant understanding. What actually matters for a creator is the ability to produce content from higher level ideas, eg from whatever mental representation you used to hold the writing or drawing in memory.
Programming is the exact same way. If ever I'm in doubt of someone's design and I have an inkling of respect for them, I'll try to design the code from scratch in my head, or sometimes even redesign a toy version myself. This usually surfaces some weird property of the problem that explains their code. You can also go through their thought processes and see exactly how they made decisions along the way. I'd argue you can even infer philosophical viewpoints in some cases, too - all without actually communicating with the author.
I love that about humans. One of the things I really admire about us.
Writing does not proceed letter by letter, word by word, paragraph by paragraph.
Earlier writing is deleted, moved, revised. Passages are moved earlier or later. Key passages are rewritten.
Etc.
Typing character-by-character an entire novel will likely teach you little about the act of literary creation.
The second quote in the parent comment is "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it." - the focus is learning more about the finished product. And I read "I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that well." as about experiencing the quality of the finished product.
However, as I started typing The call of Cthulhu, I'm now much more intrigued by this as a new way to read books. It is a very different literary experience from just simply reading. I'm way more attentive to the text itself, rather than just the meaning, if that makes sense. Though it's very possible that this effect is going to go away as I get more used to it.
Any chance of typing out custom uploaded books? Maybe copy pasted plaintext?
Also kudos on the execution, the site is really nicely made.
I had plenty of basic IT education at school, but was never taught how to type at all.
To provide an additional use case, my wife just got me an awesome and completely configurable ergonomic keyboard for my birthday and I’m considering switching to Dvorak or Coleman layouts after typing QWERY my entire life. I NEED a long form practice like this instead of just typing nonsense short blurbs of words as most typing practice provides.
Super excited about this!
I switched to dvorak over 10 years ago and since the letters on the keys didn't match, and because it's designed to make it easy to touch type, I quickly learned.
But after a year or so of dvorak, I grew tired of being extremely slow when I had to switch back to qwerty when using a shared keyboard in a conference room (imagine reading and hitting single letters in a meeting in front of people), so I switched back to qwerty. I thought that my new touch typing skill would transfer, but it didn't. I still try now and again to properly touch type, but it's slow and with a lot of mistakes. So this practice site looks very interesting to me as well!
Some people say that they can easily switch back and forth between qwerty and dvorak, but it turns out that I couldn't. I still miss the speed and ease of dvorak, but I also enjoy being able to quickly use any keyboard now.
(This is probably a more acceptable thing to do in companies where more than one language is spoken. The computer already had English-Qwerty and Danish-Qwerty installed.)
I noticed the Kinesis Advantage forced my hands into a position that encouraged touch-typing, so I thought I'd give it a try and learn to touch-type while doing my normal work (Still QWERTY though) It worked! I can now touch-type greatly...
Sort-of, it really only applies to the Kinesis though, when I go back to a normal staggered layout keyboard I go back to my two-three finger pecking around the keyboard.
It's obviously still the same layout, so I don't think I experience it as bad as you do on a standard keyboard, but now I'm pretty much stuck on my Kinesis!
We all walk every day, but most people have terrible form and efficiency and would probably injure themselves if they tried to do it for long periods without practicing...
If you have poor form when typing you can put considerable stress on your wrists and compress your shoulders.
That's why ergonomic keyboards are so big, weirdly shaped and sometimes split. They all try to force you into typing in a way that won't do as much damage to your body as slouching over a 10keyless microkeyboard would.
But it's easy when learning a skill without guidance to end up into a local maximum. It's easy to end up in a situation where you're typing reasonably well, but could do way better with training.
I'd argue that typing occupies a big enough place in our life that we should be very efficient at it.
typeracer.com allows you to submit extracts for people to type; just not entire books.
sudo apt install fortunes; sudo chmod -r /usr/share/games/fortunes/!(lit*); typefortune -l
Why not just use this? https://www.typelit.io/chapters/5f468ca35e91c10be0883a57/The...
Also, the JSON object is fault tolerant and will display whatever you want for a title, even if there isn't a book available: https://www.typelit.io/chapters/%7B%22%64%69%73%70%6C%61%79%...
{"bookTitle": "The Call of Cthulhu", "displayTitle": "The Call of Cthulhu", "language": "English", "bookId": "5f468ca35e91c10be0883a57"}
Why do you need all the others besides "bookId"?
Changing "bookTitle" and "language" don't seem to do anything. Changing "displayTitle" does change the displayed title, but why can't you get that using the bookId?
const MyPage = (props: { query: { par1: string; par2: number } }) => ( <div>{`${props.query.par1}-${props.query.par2}`}</div> );
The workflow was:
- you read the sentence
- the sentence disappears
- then you type from memory
- every time you mistype something -- the next couple of words appears for a few seconds and you keep typing
That way you not only learn to type that foreign language. But you also memorise the sentence in your short-time memory and you get a feel for sentences are created (order of words, phrases, etc.).
PS. Didn't finish the site, but I did made a simplified version as an Android app: https://github.com/tkrajina/10000sentences
- I'd prefer if the words not typed were in a lighter shade of grey so there were greater contrast between them and the words I've completed. I know this would reduce contrast with the page but I found the fact that they are such a strong grey to be somewhat of a distraction. Different people will have different preferences here, so maybe a slider or knob that can be used to adjust the contrast of yet to be typed text would be helpful.
- The fact that you can't correct mistakes is a huge annoyance and breaks my typing flow. It also tends to lead to runs of errors since I'll make a mistake, hit backspace, and then carry on typing, meaning I get an off by one error in the next few letters. I understand that you want to help people type with fewer errors but the reality is the way it works at the moment interrupts my flow much more severely than correcting the error would (and leads to far more mistakes), and you can still track the number of mistakes I make even if I'm allowed to correct them. I'd say the ability to correct mistakes should at least be an option that can be enabled or disabled according to the preference of the user.
Hope that's useful and, once again, this is very cool.
You should be able to backspace all the way back up the page. If backspace isn't working for you, feel free to let me know which browser and OS you're using, and if you're using any extensions that might effect backspace functionality. Thanks!
Does anyone know of a competitive/practice typing site (as TypeLit, or TypeRacer) where you help digitize books (or any sort of document)?
I'm very motivated by TypeRacer's competitions (it's silly, I know), but I would be even more inclined to play if I knew that there was a "greater" purpose...!
I haven't looked into Project Gutenberg's proof reading volunteering. But, something like that? A sort of "good for humanity" reCaptcha (the original one, that helped Google to digitize books)..?
---
Ideas for TypeLit:
- It would be nice if the WPM/ACC counters updated in real time in the upper right corner, not just when changing pages
- The competitive aspect of https://play.typeracer.com/ might not be a perfect fit for your site but just wondering if a leaderboard/social element could work (probably not, but just a thought)
In the case of Distributed Proofreaders you could automate the process even by creating a diff of your results with the current draft of the Works being worked on.
This is just a crazy idea nobody take it too seriously. [0]https://www.pgdp.net/c/
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html
Based on my experience with that site, which I really love, I'd love to see some additional tracking of keys. The downside of your core idea is that you can't really do the trick of forcing deliberate practice of weak key patterns to engrain them into you.
Some other suggestions for stats, based on what exists on keybr and what I'd like to see
- Time practiced today and stats for today
- Daily streaks to encourage practicing
- Cumulative time practiced
- A 7 day running average of your typing stats
- The layout is much more bearable when using ublock to remove about 60% of the site, makes it much cleaner and more enjoyable to use
- In my native language that I used for training, german, the site would frequently generate words that exist but are just spelt wrong or just stop before the last character, ruining my stats because my brain is auto-completing and auto-correcting what I'm reading so I have to go back and correct my writing to something wrong. This gets very annoying very quickly. I switched back to english after a week because that works much better and I'd recommend others to do the same.
It also increased my debugging skills as well when I entered one or more typos along the way.
(It says they quit doing the type-in programs after 1988)
Think about how masterclass does it, then niche down into startups and follow the playbook.
Feel free to ping me (email in profile) if you end up going down this path and need suggestions for initial folks to reach out to.
Oh actually, while you’re on the front page of HN, drop a contact form on the page with something like “interested in having your book hosted?”
Might “fill the funnel” with even less work. Good luck!
I am using linux and chrome with vimium and when I press f (to reveal the links) it doesn't "capture" any links for the books. I also tried it using tab to go to the books and it just jumped over them (!)
I presume you are doing some fancy JS things in the frontend that's why it can't understand the links, however I think it's a little ironic to not be able to use a practice typing site with only your keyboard :)
PS I am not trying to to be the "smart-ass" with my comment, it is honest; if the comment does not seem nice please forgive me, english ain't my primary language :|
In keybr.com you can provide your own custom text in => Setting => Provide your own custom text.
My only thought was - if I suck at typing, learning it, it's going to be very discouraging getting through just one page. I wonder if it would be better to display just a paragraph at a time. Also as the user finishes a sentence without mistakes to give them a visual reward (kinda like one of those cheap mobile games that shows stars or something). And another reward for finishing a paragraph.
Other than that, I am guessing this will likely help a lot of people learn to type or type faster.
- +1 for dynamic metrics (WPM+ACC) while typing, shown at the page dash.
- Consider partnering with publishers to increase your content coverage.
- Add ability to request books
- +10 for Tech books
- Keep it free!
- Gamify the heck out of it. It'll allow you to create revenue streams while keeping it FREE.
KEEP THE FIRE BURNING Octouroboros! ;)
- Dynamic metrics is coming very very very soon - Good idea reaching out to publishers -- I might just do that. - People just email me their requests anyway, but it might be a good idea to invite the interaction - I'd love to host tech books, but as far as I know, most aren't in the public domain - Keeping it free is the plan! - Gamification is coming once I eventually get around to making user accounts. I'm not really sure how it'll create revenue streams though, so if you have something in mind, let me know!
That said, this is not for me. One page and I was cooked. I had thought that this might be a decent way to enjoy a novel that I've not read, but one page in I can say:
Not only did I not comprehend what I was typing, I didn't enjoy it at all.
I've been looking for something exactly like this. I've switched up my keyboard layout several times in past months and need constant practice more than my daily work requires to unlearn years of muscle memory and the confusion of recent rewirings. Using normal sentences is better so that frequent words are typed/learned more often to build up that muscle memory faster/stronger.
Would you be interested in adding that?
https://quanta.wiki/n/war-and-peace
The book is mainly for demonstrating the platform capabilities, but I thought you guys might find this platform interesting.
Would be nice to also type code from famous open-source projects, to practice hitting all the parens etc.
That's all.
This is still a neat product. I typed a page from 1984. Makes me sad that I can't seem finish my own book or screenplays.
I tried learning typing typical paragraphs, got pretty fluent with it, but as soon as I tried the same with code, got stuck with those.
Fantastic and really looking forward to reading while I practice. This is so cool!
Very neat website, and very well made, congrats!
I would warm up with a few quotes every day before programming as a way of both getting better at typing and deepening my understanding of the the philosophy
Everytime I hit backspace, it will just go back.
I assume it's because it doesn't use standard text area and didn't take consideration there might be a conflict in hotkey.
Here is the code from that extension about how it detects the "editable" elements, if it helps: https://robwu.nl/crxviewer/?crx=https%3A%2F%2Fclients2.googl...
Please fix it if you can, thanks.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/go-back-with-backs...
I learnt from https://www.ratatype.com/ but the modules are now done. This will become my practice board now. Parallelly I'll be reading/writing a few classics.
This is the most beautiful and pleasant typing practice experience I've ever had.
Instead of whatever was next on the syllabus, our next assignment was to rewrite, with paper and pen, three separate (3-5ish page) essays written on the same prompt, which she had saved over the years as exemplary.
I distinctly remember hating the idea of it, and putting off the task so I could hate it for longer. However, once I started (re-)writing, I was forced to capitulate (an experience that seems to be shared with other commenters here). While the essays were really good, they were just words on a page -- there's nothing stopping me from writing like that, too. In fact, I was writing like that right now!
At the end, she shared the reasoning behind this exercise, and made us take a vow of silence to not tell the next year's students what to expect. Everybody who traced the essays got an A in the gradebook, and the kids who didn't trace usually dropped-out at that point (it was early in the year, this was the accelerated-track course).
I've never had another educational moment like that, since. It was immensely humbling, in that it told all of us, who were used to being good, that we still have plenty of room to improve. Once out of high school, our egos are perhaps too large to get the most out of that kind of activity.
This is a really cool idea. I'd love to see this applied to foreign languages. For example, if I'm learning German, it'd be great to do that by typing out Theodor Storm. Many of these classic books are in the public domain [1].
[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=VXgBAAAAYAAJ&newbks=1&newb...
If your standard is the median for our age group, they were probably better-than-middling. It was an advanced class, after all.
Actually, I think that if nobody is trying, such an exercise would be counterproductive. In that scenario, the right thing to do would be to determine and address the reasons why nobody is trying. Like I said, it was an advanced class and people were trying, so it was relatively successful.
Great Work!
I won't be surprised if this becomes really popular and then you would surely have Amazon showing interest in your innovation.
Again many congratulations for shipping out a neat idea with great implementation.
I'd enjoy an option for loading scanned text to help out with OCR, if that is even needed anymore. Perhaps overlay what I write over the scanned pages.
I made it about halfway through Worm.
I'm not an expert in pedagogy though so take that with a grain of salt.
Firefox 81, Windows: Dead keys and the corresponding combination of letters where no single letter is defined by the keyboard layout don't even appear. I.e. I type ', and then s, which normally causes the digraph 's to appear, but here neither the ' nor the s afterwards register.
Chrome 85, Windows: The key sequence registers as just one letter, but apparently not as the ', which thus is marked as an error. This was also what I've seen in Edge (Chromium-based, probably similar version number).
Internet Explorer 11: Same as with Chrome. However, with the added bonus that typing a space seems to be impossible. No idea whether that browser is even on the compatibility list for that site, but it's all I have lying around here right now.
Besides that, it's pretty good fun!
Few comments to improve your work: French language has a space before and after '?' or '!'.
Also, normally, there are also other accent on uppercase letter, for example I had 'A la serre, le croc et l'ongle.' in 'Le livre de la Jungle', the first A should be 'À'.
Chart for progression in WPM or correctness, tips to improve, audio feedback activation if error in typing...
Keep going, it's a good idea!
Both the lack of space before ? and ! and the lack of accents on the A are present in the version at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54183/54183-h/54183-h.htm , which has the following note at the bottom
Au lecteur
Ce livre électronique reproduit intégralement le texte original, et l’orthographe d’origine a été conservée. Seules les erreurs clairement introduites par le typographe ont été corrigées. Ces corrections sont soulignées en pointillés dans le texte. Positionnez le curseur sur le mot souligné pour voir l’orthographe initiale.
Cependant «Shere-Khan» a été tacitement remplacé par «Shere Khan» et «Bandar Log» par «Bandar-Log».
It also mentions that
This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at http://gallica.bnf.fr
And looking at the scan https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96184168/f18.item.r=L... it appears that while the punctuation marks did have more space in front, the A was missing the accent even in the original.
The "s" in the first sentence of "Sun Tzu said:" does not want to be recognized. My "s" key works fine in other contexts, and other letters before this one are recognized just fine.
EDIT: Actually, this seems to happen for different books, relatively early on in each. I am also seeing it in "Grimm's Fairy Tales."
I have a MBP 2020, and I am using Safari.
I decided I would try to learn "proper" form, and while it initially slowed me down, my top speed is now closer to 150-155.
Also, I think maybe the font size should be a little bit larger, at least for the text around the position where the cursor is, if not for the whole text. Otherwise, nice application!
There’s an exercise called copyworking where you rewrite copy written by someone else to internalize the rhythm, flow, punctuation, and word choice. I use it for shorter ad copy and have found it to be very valuable.
I do it with pen/paper as I find that it “sticks” better, but lots of people are resistant to that so a tool like yours might be useful.
> "... calm, learned, we're all men of sound judgement and deep scholarship here. It was an appeal to reason, and that's always dangerous. You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it."
so he rewrites it...
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...
His fiction always generates so many questions for me. Is the real writer the reader who constructs the story from the bare framework the author provides? And then is it possible for anyone to actually read the same novel?
First we start with single letter and need to type 10 page of every letter. Then we start with random combination 2 letter word, every line contain different word. For few day we practice with that. Then we start practising 3,4,5 letter combination
Slowly we moved to word -> line -> paragraph -> essay.
Learning typing will take type.
Feedback: When I miss typing a character, all subsequent characters are marked wrong (red), even when they are actually correct. For example, let's say I write "paralel" instead of "parallel". The E and L would be marked wrong, even though only the L is missing.
Using a measure like edit distance could be a better way to identify incorrect characters.
Another thing that interests me is the approach that Benjamin Franklin described in his autobiography to improve his writing.
He would read writing that he liked, note it carefully, and then after a few days he would try to reproduce the writing. Finally, he would tally it with the original writing to correct mistakes.
Maybe I'll mix it up somehow.
One nitpick: it would be helpful to only have to type out the words on the page rather than different symbols (maybe having it be a toggle). For example, in The Art of War, typing out all the bullet points and numbering can be tedious and not really what I'm looking for from a typing exercise.
Just as a possible future improvement my eyes would probably be really happy about a dark mode :)
EDIT: just realised OP already has it on TODO.
I tried to watch my hands as I typed and I noticed I only seem to type with two fingers from each hand, mostly the index finger.
I've been typing like this for years, has anyone re-trained themselves to use proper 10 finger typing or even switched straight to something like DVORAK?
Was it worth the effort?
Is that still the case?
A site like this could then used to make legal replicas of books.
There's no such thing as "moving" digital information. It's like the transporter on Star Trek, you can only fake it by copying the information and deleting the source copy.
So, I... guess you could transcribe into a pipe which appends straight to a USB stick drive, and sell the drive? Good luck reading the contents though.
In this case, all of these books are older and their copyright terms have expired.
George Orwell died in 1950, so it looks as though that book is already out of copyright in Australia and Canada, for example, but will remain in copyright till 2044 in the USA, while it comes out of copyright at the end of 2020 in the European Union. (But please don't rely on my interpretation of a Wikipedia page if it's important to you!)
Habits are hard to form, excuses are easy to make.
I'm a rather fidgety person too, so it's actually quite nice to have something for my hands to do while I'm reading!
I found it broke up touch typing into just the right size chunks to engage me.
At the start of Covid, I spent a week doing half an hour a day. My typing speed and accuracy improved out of sight. The whole process of acquiring muscle memory is quite magical. I highly recommend it.
[1] This is the companion site to http://www.speedcoder.net/, which is for coding, and presumes you start with reasonable touch typing skills on normal text.
Can there be a custom text option or similar tool available? I would like to practice code snippets.
Example: “jkk asa dfg hjk ;ah”
Consider adding poems, too:
• many already like to memorize poems, to drill their ideas/emotions, improve one's own prosody, & be able to perform for others
• quicker feeling of success than just being a page/chapter into something massive
I would keep a book open in front of me and type the sentences in Microsoft Word as I was reading them.
Glad to see this process made seamless with your site. :)
I would like to see an option to ignore case.
not sure if thats a good way to report a bug but:
one problem/bug i have. as a non native speaker i have my keyboard Layout as U.S International - PC. there is some build of characters involved in that layout for instance to type ä i press the "-key and then the a-key and it gets combined to ä but this means that if i just press the "-key i don't get " i need to press "-key + space but that doesn't seem to work here :<
I am really looking forward to sharing this with her over the weekend.
Really awesome site though!
Again - great idea. Nicely done!
(We were taught to keep our hands parallel with our forearms and had to press with force, as electrical typewriters existed by then but none were in our classroom. It was kind of like piano posture.)
How much do I have to type to get the WPM and ACC to start showing up? I did a whole page and it was still just showing --.
Great job and thanks!
Already passed it on to my partner, as we are covid-homeschooling and teaching some typing.